Latest Plate tectonics Stories
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The most dangerous fault line on the island of New Zealand is the Alpine Fault. It is approximately 80 miles northwest of the islands main city of Christchurch. Research published in the prestigious journal Science, co-authored by University of Nevada, Reno's Glenn Biasi and colleagues at GNS Science in New Zealand, shows that very large earthquakes have been occurring regularly on the Alpine Fault along the southwest coastline of...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In addition to being fairly unpredictable, volcanoes can eject a wide range of material, from mile-high plums of black ash to a deadly hail of fist-sized pumice. These ejections travel extremely fast and can reach internal temperatures between 750 to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The prevailing theory has been that the difference in particle size determined when bubbling magma deep below the volcano converts into a rising stream of gas and...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Although volcanic scientists are able to approximate the age of lava flows, determining the exact timing of each of a volcano’s eruptions has proved difficult in the past. A joint research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, University of Girona, the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) and other organizations has looked to establish a chronology of eruptions in the volcanic region of La...
Caltech researchers provide highest-resolution observations yet of the complex 2012 Sumatra earthquake The powerful magnitude-8.6 earthquake that shook Sumatra on April 11, 2012, was a seismic standout for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was larger than scientists thought an earthquake of its type could ever be. Now, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) report on their findings from the first high-resolution observations of the underwater...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Most volcanoes are situated where continental plates shift against each other. This is where the continental crust is weakened, allowing magma to break through to the surface. The Pacific "Ring of Fire" exhibits this kind of plate movement, resulting in powerful earthquakes and multiple active volcanoes. Volcanic hotspots, however, are of a completely different nature because most of them are far away from plate boundaries. The...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The largest survey of Native American DNA ever conducted has revealed that people settled the New World in three distinct waves, not one as previously believed, various media outlets reported Wednesday. According to Robert Lee Hotz of the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Medical School Geneticist David Reich and an international team of colleagues compared thousands of genetic variations among 52 contemporary Native American...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Although the earth is shaken by approximately 80,000 earthquakes every month, not many of them will send you running for the nearest doorway. However, scientists, led by a team at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, have recently started investing more time and research into understanding these subtle vibrations that occur deep in the Earth’s crust. More specifically, these researchers are interested in tectonic...
Mountain belts on Earth are most commonly formed by collision of one or more tectonic plates. The process of collision, uplift, and subsequent erosion of long mountain belts often produces profound global effects, including changes in regional and global climates, as well as the formation of important economic resources, including oil and gas reservoirs and ore deposits. Understanding the formation of mountain belts is thus a very important element of earth science research. One common but...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have accumulated the first evidence-based inclusive study of the probability for tsunamis in Northwestern California. The paper, "Paleoseismicity of the Southern End of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, Northwestern California," was co-written by professors Edward Keller and Alexander Simms from UCSB's Department of Earth Science, and published in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Sadly, the sudden death of the giant tortoise Lonesome George on the Galapagos Islands this Sunday marks the loss of another subspecies from the face of the Earth. When scientists first met Lonesome George on Pinta Island in 1972, they had thought his species, Geochelone nigra abingdoni, was already extinct. He was immediately placed into the park service’s tortoise breeding program on Santa Cruz Island and while he did mate with a female tortoise — the...
Latest Plate tectonics Reference Libraries
The Pacific Ring of Fire, or Ring of Fire for short, is an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. In a 25,000 mile horseshoe shape, it’s associated with an almost continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic belts, volcanic arcs and/or plate movement. The Ring of Fire contains 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75 percent of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes. It’s sometimes called the circum-Pacific belt or the...
Alfred Lothar Wegener (November 1, 1880 "“ November 2, 1930) was a German scientist, geologist, and meteorologist. He is best known for establishing the theory of the continental drift. His 1915 theory of continental drift surmised that the continents were slowly floating around the Earth. Most of his basis was strictly circumstantial evidence, and further he was not able to exhibit a mechanism for continental drift, which resulted in an unaccepted hypothesis until the 1950s. At that...
Peridotite is a dense, coarse grained ultrabasic rock, consisting mainly of the minerals olivine and pyroxene. Peridotite is also a group of mantle derived igneous rocks. They all are ultramafic or ultrabasic meaning they contain less than 45% silica and are high in iron and magnesium. Members of the peridotite family include: Dunite - predominately composed of olivine, with minor enstatite pyroxene and chromite. Harzburgite - composed of olivine, enstatite, and minor chromite....
Scoria is a term used by geologists to describe an igneous rock containing many gas bubbles, or vesicules. Scoria forms when magma rich in dissolved gases is vented. As the magma encounters lower pressures, the gasses are able to escape and form bubbles. These bubbles are trapped when the magma cools and solidifies. Volcanic cones of scoria can be left behind after eruptions, usually forming mountains with a crater at the summit. An example is Mount Wellington, Auckland in New Zealand....
Earth -- in geology and astronomy, fifth largest planet of the solar system and the only planet definitely known to support life. Gravitational forces have molded the earth, like all celestial bodies, into a spherical shape. However, the earth is not an exact sphere, being slightly flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. The equatorial diameter is c.7,926 mi (12,760 km) and the polar diameter 7,900 mi (12,720 km); the circumference at the equator is c.24,830 mi (40,000 km)....
